Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Victorian America

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Ad Orientem (talk) 00:43, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Victorian America

Victorian America (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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User Blythwood gave reasoning for the article's deletion in 2015, but it captures exactly my thoughts:

I increasingly believe that this article should be deleted and its content moved into other articles. I don't see the article as having established clearly that the Victorian era has a specific meaning in American political or cultural history that's different to 'the nineteenth century apart from the first third or so'. It is, after all, named after a queen who never ruled or even visited the USA.

In order to be relevant, I think this article would need to demonstrate some or all of:

• That 1837-1901 represents a defined period in American culture which shadowed aspects of British culture of the same period in defined ways.
• That 'the Victorian era' is commonly used by American historians to describe this period.

Instead of doing these, this article has no sources at all.

I'm not American or a specialist in American history, but I find all of this implausible and certainly not demonstrated by this article: the Victorian era bridges many periods of American politics which feel like useful definitions to me, including antebellum to post-reconstruction, and from the pre-railway era to the Gilded age. It feels like a walled garden-type article that shadows the real America-in-the-19th-century articles while containing content that could be better put there.

MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 20:05, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 20:14, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 20:14, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

• Delete Subject doesn't exist. You cannot place the periodization of one region on top of the events of an entirely separate region. Shame on every editor that saw this disaster and failed to nominate it for deletion. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:37, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
• Delete this is entirely unsourced, and reads like a personal essay. Power~enwiki (talk) 22:46, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
• Delete - what they said. This overlays an irrelevant and inapt framework on American history. It is arbitrary (but convenient and with longstanding practice) to divide English history by monarch reign, but it is entirely meaningless in an American context. It artificially divides the Antebellum period, while lumping periods that are quite distinct in an American context. Yes, there were some parallel developments, but not enough to justify the artificiality of such a division. Agricolae (talk) 23:18, 17 June 2017 (UTC)
• Delete - yeah, as the person who originally raised this, time hasn't made this article look better. We have some great articles on nineteenth-century America, this duplicates them pointlessly. Blythwood (talk) 00:13, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
• Delete as not verifiable. Article does not point to, as I thought it might, any reason for imposing a British political / social / economic era onto American history. Current content is similar to a school essay with broad generalizations and lazy assumptions with little connection to "Victorian" ideas apart from happening in the same time period. --Lockley (talk) 03:41, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
• Delete The only thing Victorian America really has is the housing style. Nate • (chatter) 03:42, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

I agree, but even that is dubious. That linked article states "Victorian era refers to a time period and not to a style." --Lockley (talk) 03:45, 18 June 2017 (UTC)

• Delete -- The reign of Victoria is a random section of American history, where the normal periods are colonial, ante-bellum and more recent. The Civil War which occurred in the middle of the reign is the key event of the period. Peterkingiron (talk) 17:23, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
• Delete The closest match to US history is that it does correspond quite closely to the Second Party System and Third Party System that together run from about 1828 to 1896 but that's still not enough for it to be a sensible periodisation, any more than you'd lump the French 2nd and 3rd republics together. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:49, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.